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Van Jones is trying hard to craft the progressive agenda for the next four years and his influence is growing after his humiliating departure from his role as the Obama administration’s Green Jobs czar. Jones went on NPR and talked with host Michel Martin about what demands progressives should be making on the president.

Jones directly attacked the fiscal cliff in the interview, insisting there worse things than the “so called cliff” and called the issue “alarmism.” The comments echo AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s remarks earlier last week that there is “no fiscal cliff” and that this has all been a “manufactured crisis.”

“We have time to come up with creative solutions here that do make sure that the wealthy begin to pay America back,” Jones insisted.

Jones diagnosed the countries financial woes, saying that the country went broke because of “the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars.” He then offered a solution: “If we want to fix the economy, the first thing we got to do is repeal the Bush tax cuts and pull back our military expenditures to Clinton level expenditures.”

He went on to say that there are other options besides the cliff to fix the country’s fiscal woes.

“Progressives have to stand up,” he said. “Social Security is solvent, Medicare can be fixed with minor tweaks. Why are we going to devastate those programs?”

Jones continued: “Let’s take the money from Halliburton, and KBR and the big oil companies.”

The re-distributive talk and the denial of the fiscal cliff left the NPR host in a state of questioning disbelief.